Hay fever sufferers across the North West are facing 72 hours of misery as pollen counts are set to be ‘very high’.

The Met Office has predicted the pollen count will be at ‘very high’ levels today, tomorrow and Thursday in the region, before dropping to ‘high’ on Friday and then ‘medium’ for Saturday.

A spokesman for the Met Office said: “We manage the only pollen count monitoring network in the UK using information from our network, our weather data and expertise from other organisations to produce forecasts that help support allergy and hay fever sufferers through the most difficult time of the year.”